In my imagination, one of the high-upside use cases for SourceCred is for businesses that want better coordination, more incentivized employees, better recruiting, etc. It would be good validation for SourceCred if businesses started using it as a competitive advantage in tandem with open, decentralized org structures.

It would also be easy to test SourceCred on a business-oriented application. For example, you can put an app on the iOS app store and charge people for it pretty easily. So I could put an app on the store that costs users 1$ a month, and if 5 of us signup, now we’ve got 5 dollars to pay contributors, and real money and data to work with. And importantly, contributors would be incentivized to grow the pie they all collect from, instead of pitting them against each other over a fixed pie.

I built this app a while ago: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/athlete-resources/id1287204046 and gave up on it when I moved away from iOS dev’ing, but would like to give it another shot and possibly use SourceCred in the process. It would benefit myself, the app, and SourceCred if we could succeed in building a paying user base. The iOS/Swift community is pretty active on Open Source, and you can also persist a user’s data on their phone, w/ no need for server costs. I’m also really interested in how to get designers/ product people involved, b/c the success of a product has much more to do w/ UI/UX than an app or tool designed for developers.

Was curious to hear y’alls thoughts - are there hurdles I’m not seeing ? Is it a bad idea in the first place or premature ?

I think it’s quite an interesting idea–I would love to see “open source companies” that are able to get revenues (e.g. by selling the app on the store) and split those revenues within the community, like you suggested.

I also think it’s premature. SourceCred hasn’t yet been tested at all, and I think we should first get it working well for the SourceCred community itself (see the CredSperiment and deep then wide). Once we’ve got some initial promising results here, it will make sense to start going broader with followon instances.

Of course, since it’s an open-source project, no one is stopping you from giving it a try if you feel it’s a good idea.